While there have been many distinguished American winners, including Tom Wolfe and John Updike, bad sex veterans reserve a special place in their hearts for Norman Mailer, who won posthumously in 2007 for a passage in which the word "excrement" is used so alarmingly that it threatens to put a reader off sex for good.

I wonder what those passages can have been like; the residue is replete with an obsessive interest in excrement, disease, sexual mania, and insectlike reproduction, insofar as these apply to Muslims in general and to Muslim immigrants in Europe in particular.